A Five Books Best Economics Book of the Year
A Politico Great Weekend Read
“Absolutely compelling.”
—Diane Coyle
“The evolution of modern management is usually associated with good old-fashioned intelligence and ingenuity…But capitalism is not just about the free market; it was also built on the backs of slaves.”
—Forbes
The story of modern management generally looks to the factories of England and New England for its genesis. But after scouring through old accounting books, Caitlin Rosenthal discovered that Southern planter-capitalists practiced an early form of scientific management. They took meticulous notes, carefully recording daily profits and productivity, and subjected their slaves to experiments and incentive strategies comprised of rewards and brutal punishment. Challenging the traditional depiction of slavery as a barrier to innovation, Accounting for Slavery shows how elite planters turned their power over enslaved people into a productivity advantage. The result is a groundbreaking investigation of business practices in Southern and West Indian plantations and an essential contribution to our understanding of slavery’s relationship with capitalism.
“Slavery in the United States was a business. A morally reprehensible—and very profitable business…Rosenthal argues that slaveholders…were using advanced management and accounting techniques long before their northern counterparts. Techniques that are still used by businesses today.”
—Marketplace
“Rosenthal pored over hundreds of account books from U.S. and West Indian plantations…She found that their owners employed advanced accounting and management tools, including depreciation and standardized efficiency metrics.”
—Harvard Business Review
It is commonplace to say that criminals pay their debt to society by spending time in prison, but what is a “debt to society”? How is crime understood as a debt? How has time become the equivalent for crime? And how does criminal debt relate to the kind of debt held by consumers and university students?
In Debt to Society, Miranda Joseph explores modes of accounting as they are used to create, sustain, or transform social relations. Envisioning accounting broadly to include financial accounting, managerial accounting of costs and performance, and the calculation of “debts to society” owed by criminals, Joseph argues that accounting technologies have a powerful effect on social dynamics by attributing credits and debts. From sovereign bonds and securitized credit card debt to student debt and mortgages, there is no doubt that debt and accounting structure our lives.
Exploring central components of neoliberalism (and neoliberalism in crisis) from incarceration to personal finance and university management, Debt to Society exposes the uneven distribution of accountability within our society. Joseph demonstrates how ubiquitous the forces of accounting have become in shaping all aspects of our lives, proposing that we appropriate accounting and offer alternative accounts to turn the present toward a more widely shared well-being.
Presenting financial management principles and best practices applicable to both public and academic libraries, this comprehensive text elucidates a broad array of issues crucial for those entering a managerial position. Both thorough and straightforward, Sannwald's treatment
Although introductions to courses in finance exist for a variety of fields, Robert W. Kaps provides the first text to address the subject from an aviation viewpoint. Relying on his vast experience—twenty-plus years in the airline industry and more than thirty years in aviation—Kaps seeks not only to prepare students for careers in the aviation field but also to evoke in these students an excitement about the business. Specifically, he shows students how airlines, airports, and aviation are financed. Each chapter contains examples and illustrations and ends with suggested readings and references.
Following his discussion of financial management and accounting procedures, Kaps turns to financial management and sources of financial information. Here he discusses types of business organizations, corporate goals, business ethics, maximizing share price, and sources of financial information.
Kaps also covers debt markets, financial statements, air transport sector revenue generation, and air transport operating cost management, including cost administration and labor costs, fuel, and landing fees and rentals. He describes in depth air transport yield management systems and airport financing, including revenues, ownership, operations, revenue generation, funding, allocation of Air Improvement Program funds, bonds, and passenger facility charges.
Kaps concludes with a discussion of the preparation of a business plan, which includes advice about starting and running a business. He also provides two typical business plan outlines. While the elements of fiscal management in aviation follow generally accepted accounting principles, many nuances are germane only to the airline industry. Kaps provides a basic understanding of the principles that are applicable throughout the airline industry.
This compact and original exposition of optimal control theory and applications is designed for graduate and advanced undergraduate students in economics. It presents a new elementary yet rigorous proof of the maximum principle and a new way of applying the principle that will enable students to solve any one-dimensional problem routinely. Its unified framework illuminates many famous economic examples and models.
This work also emphasizes the connection between optimal control theory and the classical themes of capital theory. It offers a fresh approach to fundamental questions such as: What is income? How should it be measured? What is its relation to wealth?
The book will be valuable to students who want to formulate and solve dynamic allocation problems. It will also be of interest to any economist who wants to understand results of the latest research on the relationship between comprehensive income accounting and wealth or welfare.
The Inka Empire stretched over much of the length and breadth of the South American Andes, encompassed elaborately planned cities linked by a complex network of roads and messengers, and created astonishing works of architecture and artistry and a compelling mythology—all without the aid of a graphic writing system. Instead, the Inkas' records consisted of devices made of knotted and dyed strings—called khipu—on which they recorded information pertaining to the organization and history of their empire. Despite more than a century of research on these remarkable devices, the khipu remain largely undeciphered.
In this benchmark book, twelve international scholars tackle the most vexed question in khipu studies: how did the Inkas record and transmit narrative records by means of knotted strings? The authors approach the problem from a variety of angles. Several essays mine Spanish colonial sources for details about the kinds of narrative encoded in the khipu. Others look at the uses to which khipu were put before and after the Conquest, as well as their current use in some contemporary Andean communities. Still others analyze the formal characteristics of khipu and seek to explain how they encode various kinds of numerical and narrative data.
Based on years of observation at a large state university, Wannabe U tracks the dispiriting consequences of trading in traditional educational values for loyalty to the market. Aping their boardroom idols, the new corporate administrators at such universities wander from job to job and reductively view the students there as future workers in need of training. Obsessed with measurable successes, they stress auditing and accountability, which leads to policies of surveillance and control dubiously cloaked in the guise of scientific administration. In this eye-opening exposé of the modern university, Tuchman paints a candid portrait of the corporatization of higher education and its impact on students and faculty.
Like the best campus novelists, Tuchman entertains with her acidly witty observations of backstage power dynamics and faculty politics, but ultimately Wannabe U is a hard-hitting account of how higher education’s misguided pursuit of success fails us all.
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